


Five Times He Says Your Name

by Decepticonsensual



Series: The World Is Not Enough (Tales from Autobot Spec Ops) [8]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 21:59:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15446754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Decepticonsensual/pseuds/Decepticonsensual
Summary: Your classic 5 + 1 fic:  five times Getaway calls Skids's name, and one time he doesn't have to.  It's a story about memories, both cherished and lost, and about mistakes of all kinds.  And ultimately, a story about what - and whom - we choose to leave behind.





	Five Times He Says Your Name

**Author's Note:**

> Contains MAJOR spoilers for LL20. Also, this was written shortly after reading that issue, and before LL21 (which I still haven't read) came out, so for all I know this has been terribly, terribly jossed by now. Take its canonicity with a grain of salt. :)
> 
> Mentions of alcohol, mentions of injuries, mentions of consensual shadowplay. Additional warnings constitute spoilers for both the fic and LL20, so if you want to read these warnings, please scroll down to the end notes.

1.

 

“Skids, right?”

 

 _I’m not so sure myself,_ Skids thinks, but he lifts his head from his hands and meets a pair of sparkling blue optics, a little too close for comfort.

 

“Getaway!” the stranger [ _is he? How much did I lose?_ ] announces, dropping down beside him. “Codebreaker, marksman, escapologist – mind if I sit? Boss thought you could do with some company.”

 

Skids follows his gesture, and his frown deepens. “ _Prowl_ said that?”

 

Something makes Getaway’s optics crinkle in amusement. “Well, not in so many words. He got momentarily less prickly in your general direction; that’s a warm blanket and a hug from anyone else. He’s worried about you,” he clarifies, a little more soberly.

 

“ _I’m_ worried about me,” Skids blurts out. He runs a shaking hand over the fresh scars on his neck. “No one will tell me what happened after the bomb went off, and it’s been _months –_ ”

 

“You got captured, Scout,” Getaway cuts in softly. “I don’t know much else, and what I do, I won’t say. Important part is, when they brought you in, you were begging for the needles. That or a bullet.”

 

“I saw.” Prowl showed him the holovid, his own taped statement of consent for the memory wipe, and the mech in the tape looked…

 

“Tell you what,” Getaway says, pulling him out of his reverie. “If I get us out of here without the Boss noticing, you buy the engex, what d’ya say?”

 

Skids stares at his own hands for a moment longer, and then rips the medical tracker bracelet off his wrist.

 

“Attaboy! Now shush,” Getaway whispers. He takes Skids’s hand and leads him to a hidden vent in the wall, the lock on which springs open at a touch, like magic.

 

(Skids doesn’t see the wink Getaway favours Prowl with as they slip out, or the thin almost-smile he gets in return.)

 

2.

 

“Skids?”

 

It’s an awful, raw sound in the darkness, but it’s the first his partner has spoken in hours, and Skids instantly turns towards it. “I’m here.” He shuffles closer – as much as he can, given the cramped confines of their hiding place – and lays a hand over Getaway’s spark, trying to get a pulse. “Are you in pain?”

 

Getaway huffs a laugh, one that sounds like rust. Skids can fill in the answer. At least the bleeding seems to have stopped, he notices, as he moves his other hand to skim the torn wires protruding where Getaway’s left arm is supposed to be.

 

“Do you reckon...” Getaway stops, cycles air for a moment. “Do you reckon anyone’ll remember us, if we don’t make it back? Maybe even wear the old black badge for a bit, for us?”

 

“We’re not going to die here, Getaway.” Skids shifts his grip from Getaway’s wound to the side of his neck, willing those flickering optics to his. “Too fast, too clever, too pretty to die, right?”

 

It sounds hollow in the dark, with none of the conviction it had when Getaway – drunkenly draped over Skids’s lap in an alien bar on Troja Major – said it in reply to Skids laughing at him for trying a drink called a “Mech-Slayer”. _Too fast, too clever, and too_ _Primus-_ _damned pretty to die, Scout,_ Getaway slurred, his optics crinkling merrily, as he reached up to bomp Skids’s nose. _You and me, we’re gonna live forever. Trust me._

 

“Besides,” Skids continues, a little too jovial and a little too fast, “the Boss will send an extraction team if we don’t turn up. We’re his favourites.”

 

Getaway’s voice is faint, and frighteningly wet. “I don’t think that’s how it works, Skids. Not anymore – not since –”

 

He breaks off, coughing, but he doesn’t really have to finish the sentence. The war has taken a brutal turn, and there are simply not enough bodies to hurl at the enemy, never mind keep in reserve. The days of sending a ten-mech squad to rescue a single operative in trouble are long gone. Help isn’t coming.

 

A restless little whimper escapes Getaway, and Skids stretches out next to him, cradling him. He draws Getaway’s head into the crook of his shoulder and kisses the blue biolights on his helm.

 

“You should get out,” Getaway whispers. When Skids glances down, startled, Getaway’s optics are averted. “You can. You should leave –”

 

“You shut your mouth,” Skids mutters rebelliously, clutching him tighter.

 

“It’s what the Boss would say.”

 

“Then frag him, too.”

 

3.

 

_Skids?_

 

Whatever Skids was expecting when they took him, it wasn’t this.

 

_It’s me, Getaway._

 

Blue optics, craning eagerly, just a few inches from his. Of course, not the first person to recognise him – Chromedome did, among others, and Skids always feels a bit put out at the imbalance in being known by those he’s forgotten – but there’s something different –

 

_Getawaaaaay? Code breaker, marksman, escapologist? No? Do I have to hit you?_

 

The stranger... no. Not a stranger, but an imperative, burned across the blank space of his memory. He knows this one. He knows him like he knows the pulse of fuel in his own lines.

 

 _I don’t mean_ hit _you, I mean –_ BOMP!

 

He’s still unprepared for the mech – for Getaway – to bop him on the nose. He opens his mouth to object, to say, _You know I hate when you do that –_

 

And stops cold, because he does know.

 

 _All those people who’ve touched my life,_ he told Chromedome months ago. _I hate to think I’ve forgotten them._

 

Now he has a name, and a touch. It’s not a lot, but to Skids it feels like dawn breaking.

 

4.

 

“Skids?”

 

Skids lifts his optics to his one-time partner’s. “But you’re not asking about _someone,_ are you, Getaway? You’re pretending this is hypothetical when it’s not.”

 

“Maybe,” Getaway allows. His fingers twitch on the tabletop. “So?”

 

Skids squeezes his optics shut. When he opens them again, he forces himself to meet Getaway’s gaze, to watch the hurt he knows his words are going to put there. “You know I’d have to stop you.”

 

One of the lingering effects of the nudge gun is that Skids still forgets its existence if he’s not looking at it, and maybe that’s why he never sees it in Atomizer’s hand.

 

5.

 

“Skids?”

 

Star Saber looks up from his scanners. On the screen above them, in living and obnoxious colour, Rodimus has just swanned into view at the head of his little coterie of traitors. They’ve picked up a few new faces, it seems. And shed three familiar ones. A small corner of Getaway’s mind registers Megatron’s absence, and then Tailgate’s, but any triumph or remorse he might otherwise feel is shoved aside; he’s half-out of the captain’s chair, searching the image desperately for that third missing figure.

 

Star Saber reads off the display, “The following individuals have been detected: Rodimus, Ultra Magnus, Drift, Ratch-”

 

“I heard your little recitation the first time. I’m asking. Is. Skids. There.”

 

A pause. “No.”

 

 _Left behind,_ Getaway insists to himself, and even, for one wild moment, _maybe come to his senses…_

 

And he sees the badges, necrotic grey, edged in black.

 

What was left that was Getaway breaks.

 

 

+1

 

He doesn’t ask, this time. He doesn’t need to. He only catches the form out of the corner of his optic, but there’s no one else it could be.

 

“Another comforting hallucination before I die?” he drawls.

 

“Not a hallucination.” It should hurt, hearing Skids’s voice, but everything feels curiously detached. “Not before, either.”

 

Getaway’s optics widen as that sinks in, and he turns.

 

The furnace room of the hated _Lost Light_ has vanished, and instead, he’s standing planetside, proper metal under his feet. There’s no sun, and yet the sky is a luminous silver-white. Before him stretches a broad road. The whole landscape is bright, but the road gleams with its own light, a river of gold snaking its way to an impossibly distant horizon.

 

And in front of the road is Skids, whole, his optics alight with a rage Getaway’s never seen before.

 

“Definitely not comforting,” Skids spits. “You _fucking bastard._ ”

 

“Megatron –”

 

“ _Don’t._ Don’t.”

 

After a moment, Getaway drops down, curling his arms around his knees like the protoform he never really was. He’s realising that his form is less substantial here – he can just about feel his own plating, but it’s distant, as if he were touching it with hands numb with cold – and yet he still feels like he has weight. More weight, in fact. The ghost of him is so heavy, it’s a wonder he doesn’t plummet straight through the shining road beneath him.  


“Yeah. I am.” He scrubs over his mask with one hand, imagining he can still feel the awful scrape of burrowing teeth. “And you don’t even know the half of what I did, after you’d gone.”  


“I know _everything_ you’ve done.” Skids’s usually gentle voice is a foreboding rasp, the whisper of an oncoming storm.  


He stretches his arm out beside him, and the air that isn’t air shimmers, threads of gold twining together into a long, wicked shape, until Skids is holding a sword made of light in his hand. Getaway can do nothing but stare, as his one-time partner swings the blade in an arc, bringing it to bear –  


And then suddenly turns his wrist, and tosses the sword to a dumbstruck Getaway.  


“And so do they,” Skids finishes, nodding just over Getaway’s shoulder. Getaway stands, turns – and oh, it’s strange to feel fear without the physical symptoms, no tanks to churn or struts to feel a chill creep along them, just that black pit of horror in the mind. Behind him, dim shapes are forming, detaching themselves one by one from the light. Their faces are indistinct as they shamble forwards, but there is an intent in the way they move that makes Getaway back up, raising the blade.  


Skids pulls another sword from thin air, and moves so that he and Getaway are standing back to back.  


“What _are_ they?”  


“All your sins,” Skids answers, his tone wry. “Everyone faces different challenges on their way to ascend. It can be a puzzle or a treacherous road, too, it’s not always a fight. Depends on what you did that you need to atone for – or didn’t do.”  


“So are they here for you or me? Or both of us?”  


“Oh, definitely you.” There’s a movement against his back, and Skids grunts as he lunges; the shadows retreat for a second, only to cluster closer, hissing. “I’ve passed my challenges already. Got all the way to the gates of the Great City before I turned back.”  


Getaway is so startled he almost drops his sword, only bringing it up belatedly when one of the shadows leaps towards his face. For just a second, he could have sworn it had blue optics, with flames streaming from its red-and-gold plating – “You came back… for me?”  


There’s a long silence, only the hum of blades through the air. The creatures, whatever they are, move and attack without sound.  


Just when Getaway thinks that Skids won’t answer, he hears the low murmur: “I almost didn’t. But… before I died, I _remembered_.” Without a frame, Getaway still trembles. “I’m so angry at you,” Skids continues. “I’m angrier than I ever was at the Commandant – yeah, I figured you knew that story. I don’t know if I can ever forgive you, even here.”  


Skids’s blade cleaves a shadow in half. When it dissipates, the road beyond them gleams a little brighter.  


“But I’m not going to leave you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warning: Major character death(s), canonical.


End file.
